Japan

Grass Babies, Moon Babies emerges from Ei Arakawa-Nash becoming a queer artistparent, merging artmaking and parenting into a shared, collective practice of care. For the 70th anniversary of the Japan Pavilion, the work channels the pavilion’s architect Yoshizaka Takamasa’s philosophy of “DISCONT (discontinuous unity)”, where individual subjectivities and collective agencies converge as one.

Visitors begin in the iconic pilotis area, holding one of 200 baby dolls before wandering through gardens and into the Pavilion’s interior. A sound piece featuring the artist’s twin babies fills the space, while screens display scenes of historical and contemporary films that unsettle fixed notions of “Japanese” identity through diasporic presence. Each screen is encircled by “babies” observing the contents’ relevance for the future. Near the exit, visitors perform an ultimate act of care by changing the baby’s diaper, unlocking a QR-code ritual that gifts an oracular poem based on each baby’s birthday dates drawn largely from the entangled twentieth-century histories of Japan, the US and Asia.

Arakawa-Nash’s Japan Pavilion weighs: how can we celebrate a new generation of babies while we, as caregivers, undertake the unfinished work of reparations and amends that shape the world they enter?